Tag | Microsoft Posts

Just a small rant here. Today the Windows Phone 8 GDR2 update finally became available for Nokia handset users. Now I’m not sure that it is AT&T fault entirely that Samsung and HTC users got their updates two months ago and we are just finally seeing it. It may have something to do with the Nokia Amber update. But every Windows Phone update on AT&T from 7.1 on seems to have been delayed. How is it that the premiere Windows Phone carrier is always the last one to release updates? Smart phone ...

I saw a YouTube video that when you boiled it down said that since Microsoft isn’t predominantly an open source company that they are irrelevant. The speaker strikes me as someone who doesn’t live in the real world. I rarely see a client that is exclusively Microsoft technology especially after a number of mergers. I have worked often on projects that used Web Sphere long side IIS, DB2 and Oracle along with SQL Server, and open source tools along with purchased frameworks. Of course we can always ...

This Christmas our household got its first Android devices. They were a couple of off-brand tablets and I have come to hate them. We bought them because they were cheaper. In this post I will be looking at this from an average consumer perspective. What was the experience and how does it affect my view of the platform. The main issue is the ability to download apps. This particular tablet did not come with the Google Play Store app. Instead it came with a link to download the Amazon Store app. I ...

The end of the world must be coming. Not because the Mayan calendar says so, but because Microsoft is innovating more than Apple. It has been a crazy year, with pundits declaring not that the end of the world is coming, but that the end of Microsoft is coming. Let’s take a look at what 2012 has brought us. The beginning of year is a blur. I managed to get to TechEd in June which was the first time that I got to take a deep dive into Windows 8 and many other things that had been announced in 2011. ...

I think you probably read my rant about the logistics at Build 2012, as posted here, so I am not going into that anymore. Instead, let’s look at the content. (BTW If you did read that post and want some more info then read Nia Angelina’s post about Build. I have nothing to add to that.) As usual, there were good speakers and some speakers who could benefit from some speaker training. I find it hard to understand why Microsoft allows certain people on stage, people who speak English with such strong ...

Today Nokia and Microsoft had an event to officially introduce the Lumia 920. Below is a rundown of some of the things I found interesting. As a person who likes photography there was a lot to drool over. The main feature that caught my attention was PureView with its optical stabilization. This alone should improve the majority of you pictures. Add to that the SmartShoot Object remover that uses multiple images to remove unwanted people or objects that move through your picture and you never have ...

As if the Surface announcement on Monday wasn’t exciting enough, today Microsoft announce that Windows Phone 8 will be coming this fall. That itself is great news, but the features coming were like confetti flying in all different directions. Given this speed I couldn’t capture every feature they covered. A summary of what I did capture is listed below starting with their eight main features. Common Core The first thing that they covered is that Windows Phone 8 will share a core OS with Windows 8. ...

I recently created a DLL and I wanted to reference it from a project I was developing in Visual Studio. In previous versions of Windows, doing so was simply a matter of dropping the DLL file in the C:\Windows\assembly folder. That would add the DLL to the Global Assembly Cache (GAC) and make it accessible in Visual Studio. However, as is often the case, Window 7 is different. Even if you have Administrator privileges on your machine, you still do not have permission to drop a file in the assembly ...

The W8 preview is now installed and I am enjoying it. I remember the learning curve of my first unix machine back in the eighties, this ain't that.It is normal for me to do the first os install with a keyboard and low end monitor...you never know what you'll encounter out in the field. The OS took like a fish to water. I used a low end INTEL motherboard dp55w I gathered on the cheap, an 1157 i5 from the used bin a pair of 6 gig ddr3 sticks, a rosewell 550 watt power supply a cheap used twenty buck ...

Hello folks, Recently I got involved in a project for building a demo application for one of our customers with Kinect for Windows. Yes, something similar what Tom Cruise did in the movie Minority Report. Waving arms, moving stuff around, swipes, speech recognition, manipulating computer screens without even touching it. Pretty cool!!! The idea in the movie showed us how technology would be after 50 years from that day. Minority Report Movie clip. Well, that 50 years of time frame got squeezed and ...

Next Tuesday, Microsoft will issue a number of critical patches. I urge you to apply the patches to your desktop PCs A.S.A.P. , then deploy to your test servers, test, get signoff and deploy to production.More information can be obtained at:http://www.computerworld... ...

The Microsoft Press half price deal of the day at http://shop.oreilly.com/pro... is the training material for the MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-516) "Accessing Data with Microsoft® .NET Framework 4""EXAM PREP GUIDE Ace your preparation for the skills measured by MCTS Exam 70-516—and on the job—with this official Microsoft study guide. Work at your own pace through a series of lessons and reviews that fully cover each exam objective. Then, reinforce and apply what you’ve ...

I recently wanted to have a console application that had configuration specific settings. For instance, if I had two configurations “Debug” and “Release”, depending on the currently selected configuration I wanted it to use a specific configuration file (either debug or config). If you are wanting to do something similar, here is a potential solution that worked for me. Setting up a demo app to illustrate the point First, let’s set up an application that will demonstrate the most basic concept. using ...

Their site is www.orlandocodecamp.comThis year's camp was held at Seminole State College.It was well worth it.. Took a chance at going.. by getting up at 5am and driving from Jax to Sanford for 2+hr..Run into some old friends and bunch of new ones. Coders are not really good at networking.. but they sure did show up.. attendance was solid 500+ geeks and some sessions were standing room only. MVP John Papa had the room packed out on his every session. Really enjoyed great and inspiring WP7 presentations ...

Today I received an email from Microsoft stating that: Dear Jakob Ehn, Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2012 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in Visual Studio ALM technical communities during the past year. This is incredibles news and I really want to thank both the people at Microsoft who nominated me and ...

MapRedux – #PowerShell and #Big Data Have you been hearing about “big data”, “map reduce” and other large scale computing terms over the past couple of years and been curious to dig into more detail? Have you read some of the Apache Hadoop online documentation and unfortunately concluded that it wasn't feasible to setup a “test” hadoop environment on your machine? More recently, I have read about some of Microsoft’s work to enable Hadoop on the Azure cloud. Being a "Microsoft"-leaning technologist, ...

For the last decade, I have repeatedly, in my imitable Microsoft fan boy style, offered an alternative view to commonly held beliefs about Microsoft's stance on open source licensing. In earlier times, leading figures in Microsoft were very vocal in resisting the idea that commercial licensing is outmoded or morally reprehensible. Many people interpreted this as all-out corporate opposition to open source licensing. I never read it that way. It is true that I've met individual employees of Microsoft ...

So, day 1 of DevWeek. Lots and lots of Windows 8 and WinRT, as you would expect. The keynote had some actual content in it, fleshed out some of the details of how your apps linked into the Metro infrastructure, and confirmed that there would indeed be an enterprise version of the app store available for Metro apps.) However, that's, not what I want to focus this post on. What I do want to focus on is this: Windows 8 does not make .NET developers obsolete. Phew! .NET in the New Ecosystem In all the ...

Today's deal of the day from Microsoft Press at http://shop.oreilly.com/pro... is Getting More Productive with Microsoft® Visual Studio®"Take a detailed look into Visual Studio—and learn practical techniques to help you work more efficiently. This fully revised and expanded version of Visual Studio Tips: 251 Ways to Improve Your Productivity includes a comprehensive collection of tips and shortcuts for working with the code editor, visual designers, searches, debugger, and other ...

The ASP.NET MVC template drops a copy of Modernizr 1.7 in your project automatically, and if you check for NuGet updates the library is brought up to the current version - 2.5.3. The NuGet package is a a great way to introduce developers to Modernizr and makes checks for updates easy. But when adding Modernizr to your projects consider two alternatives: Alternative One – Content Delivery Network: Microsoft CDN currently hosts two Modernizr versions – 1.7 and 2.0.6. By using a CDN copy you increase ...

In my last blog I talked about a new WP7 utility application. My intention at the time was to build a Wi-Fi strength meter, but after some research, I discovered that Microsoft has that part of the phone sandboxed. Its not a big deal now, but I hope they unlock those features in a future update as it could lead to some real cool applications. So what now? Well at first, I felt I was at a crossroads on application ideas. I still plan to release Mixtio Reader, but until I get some other issues worked ...

In the previous post I demonstrated how to implement a very basic transport extension over an in memory message bus that supports request reply MEP. At the end of that post I created a console application and establish the service and client directly through the channel listener (on the server side) and the channel factory (on the client side). But this is not the WCF usage that we are familiar with. If you have been using the WCF for a while the common pattern is to create a ServiceHost on the server ...

On March 10th, 2012 the first ever PowerShell Saturday conference took place in Columbus, OH and I couldn’t be happier with the outcome. We had 100 attendees from 10 different states (the biggest surprise to me) come to see 6 speakers present on a variety of PowerShell topics: introduction, WMI, SharePoint, Active Directory, Exchange, 3rd party products and more. A big thank you also goes out to a number of people. Planning committee Wes Stahler, lead organizer of PowerShell Saturday Columbus, president ...

In my early development days, I used Microsoft Access for building databases. It made things easy since I only needed to package the database with the installation package so my clients would have access to it. When we began the development of a new package in Visual Studio .NET I decided to use SQL Server Express. It was free and provided good tools - also free. I thought it was a tremendous idea until it came time to distribute our new software! What a surprise. The nightmare Ah, the choices! Detach ...

Figuring out which software licensing options best suit your needs while being cost-effective can be confusing. Some businesses end up making their purchases through retail stores which means they miss out on volume licensing opportunities and others may unknowingly be using unlicensed software which means their business may be at risk. So let me help you make the best decision for your situation. You may want to review this blog post that lays out licensing basics for any organization that needs ...

You’ve likely heard about how Office 365 and Windows Intune are great applications to get you started with Cloud Computing. Many of you emailed me asking for more info on what Cloud Computing is, including the distinction between "Public Cloud" and "Private Cloud". I want to address these questions and help you get started. Let's begin with a brief set of definitions and some places to find more info; however, an excellent place where you can always learn more about Cloud Computing is the Microsoft ...

Every fall and spring, a survey goes out to a few hundred thousand IT folk in Canada asking what they think of Microsoft as a company. The information they get from this survey helps them understand what problems and issues you’re facing and how they can do better. The team at Microsoft Canada takes the input they get from this survey very seriously. Now I don’t know who of you will get the survey and who won’t but if you do find an email in your inbox from "Microsoft Feedback” with an email address ...

Yes, now more ways to get connected to TFS 2010. Up until now, if you have to connect to TFS 2010 from other platforms - be it Linux, Mac, Solaris etc., you had to purchase a CAL (Client Access License) or a 90-day free trial of the Team Explorer Everywhere 2010. You don't have to do that anymore. Microsoft has made it free and released an update with Team Explorer Everywhere with SP1. Here's the download link - http://www.microsoft.com/do... Have fun coding ...

Microsoft is running another Dream Build Play contest and once again I’m entering. (You can enter too by registering here –> https://www.dreambuildplay.... I’ve entered every year since the inaugural launch in 2007. Every year I had a fantastic game idea. Every year I worked really hard on it. Every year I never finished and never submitted. So why am I doing this yet again? Because I want to be part of something. I miss the old XNA community of yore and with lack of announcements ...

One of my favorite Code Camps, and not only because it’s only an hour or so away, but because it’s Orlando, Florida! session name: Metro Design Language - WP7 & Windows "8" speaker:Nikita Polyakov level:100 description:Metro Design Language key concepts and ideas around Metro design as it is used in Windows Phone, Windows "8", and even XBOX. We will take a look at different templates available for each platform.ANDname: Intro to Dynamic Prototyping w/ SketchFlow speaker: Nikita Polyakov level: ...

If you are installing SharePoint 2010 on a new box you might see the Setup Errors notification from the installer. In my case, I am using Windows Server 2008 R2, but I have seen the similar Error on Windows 7 as well with little less requirements. As you can understand all the “-“ bullets are the requirements that needs to be installed or configured on the box. There are two ways to do this 1) Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Product Preparation tool In the SharePoint 2010 Splash Form, you can find that ...

For the past couple of years or so, I’ve been using both OneNote and Evernote to collect random pieces of information I need to remember: todo lists, random thoughts, recipes, photos of things like the meds I’m currently taking, etc. There is no rhyme or reason to which app I use; it’s just whatever comes to mind first. Recently, the content of each has become large enough that I think it’s time to pick one and go with it. They both have desktop and mobile versions, so that obvious criterion is out. ...

Wow, today is an exciting day for me: I’m officially an author of a published book. The book is titled Microsoft SharePoint 2010: Creating and Implementing Real-World Projects. Here is the blurb from the back cover: Build effective solutions for real-world business scenarios—using out-of-the-box tools in Microsoft SharePoint Server, SharePoint Foundation, and Office 365. Each chapter in this hands-on book focuses on a single business project, using a standard approach to guide you through the solution-building ...

Today's 50% off Deal of the Day from O'Reilly is Developer's Guide to Collections in Microsoft® .NET "Put .NET collections to work—and manage issues with GUI data binding, threading, data querying, and storage. Led by a data collection expert, you'll gain task-oriented guidance, exercises, and extensive code samples to tackle common problems and improve application performance. This one-stop reference is designed for experienced Microsoft Visual Basic® and C# developers—whether you’re already using ...

It is with some sadness that I write this post as my last for the Redmond Diary blog on the Redmond Developer News and Visual Studio Magazine Web sites. Eleven days ago, I started a new blog for ZDNet covering Big Data, at http://zdnet.com/blog/big-d... There’s been a ton of interest around Big Data in the industry lately and the topic ties into the database and BI work that I’ve done throughout most of my career. So when I was asked to write the blog, I really couldn’t say no. I agreed to write ...

If anyone of you has debugged managed crash dumps, I am sure you must have come across a situation when debugger keeps telling you it’s not able to load mscordacwks.dll. It usually happens when the dump was taken from a machine that had a specific version on .NET framework with patches installed and the machine where the crash dump is being analyzed has different .NET framework version number. When I talk about different version no, I mean the minor version. E.g. Crash dump was taken from machine ...

Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. Anyone who has done any .NET programming has most likely used the DateTime structure at one time or another in their development. It is a handy structure for storing dates, times, or date-times relating to the local time zone (or, alternatively, UTC). That said, ...

This is just one of those cool post which are not written as often as it should be. Hats off to Glenn Berry for stating it so clearly for all BI / database developers.http://sqlserver... read some Microsoft paper on "Fast Track Data Warehouse Architecture", and did not appreciate the benefit at the time. What a great way for developers to start with someone already figured out the licensing + cost + performance. There ...

As announced earlier, Microsoft has released the Visual Studio 2012 Consumer Preview. This is the VS Ultimate SKU Beta available for download. You can get it from the link below. http://www.microsoft.com/vi... ...

Today's Microsoft Press Ebook Deal of the Day at http://shop.oreilly.com/cat... is 50% off a series of E-books by William R. Stanekinin celebration of the launch of Microsoft SQL Server 2012. This offer will run to 14:00 PT on 8/March/2012. There are 12 other books also available at 50% off ...

Recently a colleague of mine encountered the error below and wanted to know how to get past itRecently a colleague of mine encountered the error below and wanted to know how to get past it. When configuring SharePoint 2010 Publish Portal you encounter the following error “The form cannot be rendered. This may be due to a misconfiguration of the Microsoft SharePoint Server State Service. For more information, contact your server administrator. “ This issue is caused by lack of Session State Service ...

After months of plotting and planning and organizing the logistics to host a full day workshop for the local area .NET developers/enthusiasts (refer to my post, Trials and Tribulations of Running a Full Day Workshop), CTTDNUG's Mobile + Cloud App Workshop went off without a hitch! Not without some minor bumps along the way, believe you me. In the 24 hours leading up to that event, I had my fair share of concerns. Mainly the weather. Environment Canada had issued a severe weather alert that resembled ...